At the start of the year, I want to wish you a healthy, bright, and successful new year. With this start, we bring you exciting, new intelligent innovations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 release to make your organization more intelligent, efficient, and help you to run your business better every day.

Hello Everyone, this is Harish Mangtani from SAP Product Engineering at SAP SE Germany. I hope you read my blogs for the last releases of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to gain insights into the key innovations that we have delivered, do check out here – 2111,  2108 and 2105

Let’s start with the Product Video where I can walk you through the 3 major innovations of this release.

Key Highlights:

Product Sourcing in Sourcing and Contract Management

• Optimized sourcing of ‘Direct Materials’

SAP Central Invoice Management

• SAP Central Invoice Management, Inbound Processing Module

Operational Procurement (Purchase Requisition)

• Verification of International Trade Compliance in Purchase Requisitions
• Support for custom document types in Purchase Requisitions

Central Procurement

• Simulation of Central Purchase Contract distribution

Integration

• Support of inventory reservations between S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Ariba Guided Buying

Optimized sourcing of ‘Direct Materials’

For Sourcing Managers, for all your Sourcing requirements of direct materials across various plants, now we support Optimized sourcing of ‘Direct Materials’.

This process allows sourcing managers to get an overview of all the requirements of sourcing direct materials across various plants in different connected systems and then start the sourcing process. This innovation specifically addresses the direct material sourcing needs of Automotive and Industrial Machinery & Component industry customers.

We support different types of scenarios like

• Strategic Product Sourcing
• Demand-driven Product Sourcing

In Strategic Product Sourcing, Sourcing Managers start with Ideation till Contract distribution to selected suppliers.

Pic: Strategic Product Sourcing

Sourcing Managers start the sourcing process by the creation of a Sourcing Project for the procurement project, adding all your sourcing requirements and other details like payment terms, shipping instructions, and demand for various time frames and plant details – add your preferred suppliers, and finally publish the project.

Suppliers can send quotations now, you can conduct sourcing with competitive suppliers by inviting them for the bidding process, compare submitted supplier quotations, negotiate with suppliers, select the best quotation that matches your needs, and finally award the bid to one or more suppliers, as a next step you can create follow on document like Central Purchase Contract to enable operational procurement of direct materials.

In Demand-driven Product Sourcing, Sourcing Managers initiate the sourcing project based on acquired Purchase Requisitions from multiple connected backed systems. All other steps will remain the same for the entire sourcing process.

Pic: Demand-driven Product Sourcing

This way, we support with End to end capabilities to run the electronic sourcing process, starting with the creation of the Sourcing Project until the creation of a contract. An easy way to create more transparency with improved efficiency and cost savings.

To support the entire sourcing process, many applications are available on SAP S/4HANA Cloud system like Preferred Supplier List, Supplier Quotations, etc., you will find more information here.

Check out this demo to get familiarized.

Demo: Optimized sourcing of ‘Direct Materials’

SAP Central Invoice Management, Inbound Processing Module

SAP Central Invoice Management is a solution built on SAP BTP that provides customers a single point of access and visibility to supplier invoices from multiple connected systems, such as SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems.

We now release SAP Central Invoice Management, an inbound processing module, an add-on to SAP Central Invoice Management that allows supplier invoice capture and inbound processing that
complements SAP Central Invoice Management visibility capabilities with supplier invoice inbound processing. It is deployed on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and tightly integrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

We are leveraging SAP Fiori to provide a seamless user experience. This Solution enables users to manually upload one or more supplier invoices in various formats like PDF, JPG, PNG. and automatically reads the invoice content through an embedded document information extraction service using optical character recognition (OCR). Users can prefill invoice data based on configured default values and edit and correct invoice details if automatic processing is not possible. Invoice documents can be stored in local document management solutions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Invoices with a PO reference are posted in S/4HANA Cloud for automatic invoice processing and Non-PO invoices are parked in S/4HANA Cloud to be manually processed. We’re leveraging the workflow and approval capabilities of S/4HANA Cloud.

This helps to Improve accounts payable productivity through central invoice visibility and processing and Increase paper and PDF invoice automation by leveraging embedded image conversion capabilities.

Pic: Central Invoice Management

It is an offering to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customers, an extension to existing invoicing capabilities (For Ex: Open Text) deployed on SAP BTP tightly integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud System. Here you can find our vision on the Roadmap.

Also, “What`s New document” to keep yourself updated with already released and upcoming features.

Check out this demo to get familiarized.

Demo: SAP Central Invoice Management

Verification of International Trade Compliance in Purchase Requisitions

International Trade Compliance is used to ensure that international trading transactions meet international trade provisions. With this feature, international trade compliance is integrated with purchase requisitions.

As a Purchaser, when you create a Purchase Requisition (PR) using the Manage Purchase Requisitions – Professional App and save the item, a trade compliance check is triggered, if it returns an error then the PR item is created in a blocked state, and the follow-on process is blocked.

The blocked state is indicated in Purchase Requisitions that do not comply with trade regulations and these requisitions can be unblocked by the trade compliance officer once the compliance issues are resolved.

A great way how we can bring improved compliance by integrating compliance checks.

Pic: Verification of International Trade Compliance in PRs

Support for custom document types in Purchase Requisitions

With this feature, configuration experts can define custom Purchase Requisition document types, the permissible item categories within these document types, and their number ranges.

Employees and Purchasers can create PRs for these custom document types using Create Purchase Requisition and Manage Purchase Requisitions – Professional app.  Approvers can then view, edit, and make decisions on these requisitions using the My Inbox app and the Edit and Approve Purchase Requisition app.

Configuration experts can use the two new configurations Define Document Types and Define Number Ranges for Purchase Requisitions that are now available in the Manage Your Solution app and can maintain custom document types for users in the Default Settings for Users app.

With this, experts can activate overall (header) level or item level release for the custom document types using the configuration Activate Flexible Workflow for Purchase Requisitions.

Pic: Support for custom document types in PRs

This helps with increased flexibility with the possibility to define custom PR document types and number ranges and improved usability with provisions to better suit customer requirements.

Simulation of Central Purchase Contract distribution

Distributing a Central Purchase Contract to various connected systems is an asynchronous background task, which can only show any success or error messages after the fact when the distribution has already finished. In order to guarantee flawless distribution, Central Purchasers will now receive the capability of triggering a distribution simulation upfront, while they are still in preparation of the final central contract.

This simulation can also be triggered as a background process and once it is finished, the purchaser can display any potential distribution errors in the same way as an actual distribution would have been carried out. Potential issues, such as material masters that are marked for deletion or if there are blocked suppliers, can be identified very early during the contract creation process and can be corrected in time before the final release of the contract.

This helps to reduce distribution errors by offering Central Purchasers the opportunity to validate the correctness of Central Contract data before the final release of the contract.

Pic: Simulation of Central Purchase Contract distribution

Support of inventory reservations between S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Ariba Guided Buying

Now, for our customers using Intelligent Enterprise Solutions(IES) for Source to Pay(S2P),  in landscape of SAP S/4HANA Cloud system integrated with SAP Ariba and for the following scope items, we also support the creation of Inventory Item requests in SAP Guided Buying.

• Guided Buying Capability with SAP Ariba Buying (Scope Item: 2NV)‎
• Guided Buying for Central Procurement with SAP Ariba Buying (Scope Item: ‏3EN‏)

Buyers can now create requests for Inventory Items in SAP Ariba Buying and send these requests to SAP S/4HANA Cloud System. Inventory items are items that are stocked by your organization, such as MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) items or items that are manufactured by your organization.

Buyers can integrate inventory items into Guided Buying as a catalog and can add inventory items to cart, same as other items. Inventory and non-inventory items can be included in the same requisition. Users can use the standard approval flow to approve the reservation request, once it is approved it will then be sent to SAP S/4HANA Cloud system and if the requested item is in stock then a reservation is created. Users can view reservation numbers on the Purchase Requisition document in the Guided Buying.

This helps Buyers to procure inventory items directly in the Guided Buying UI, and is not required to go to a separate system to find inventory items (that are in stock) or to  a external suppliers. This way we help with improved efficiency and end-user satisfaction.

Pic. Sending inventory reservation requests from Guided Buying to SAP S/4HANA

Well, that is all I wanted to share with you in this release, if you have any questions or thoughts feel free to post in the comments section or you can also ask directly in the SAP Community 

Do follow my profile if you would like to know the latest and greatest features in Sourcing & Procurement with every release.

• More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud:
  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
  • Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blog Posts here and previous release highlights here
  • Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
  • SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
  • Early Release Webinar Series here
  • Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
  • openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here
  • Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
  • Feature Scope Description here
  • What’s New here
  • Help Portal Product Page here
  • Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself on @LinkedinHarish & @twitterHarryMangtani